Experiments with Truth: Gandhi and Images of Nonviolence
Description
Taking the form of a reader, this fascinating book explores the resonance of Gandhi’s ethics of nonviolence in the visual arts. Texts range across influences on Gandhian philosophy and outgrowths from it: the words of famous peacemakers, religious texts that inspired Gandhi, newly written historical essays, and reports on nonviolent action. Images include Gandhi’s own iconography; portraits of the Mahatma’s forebears and followers; photojournalism of nonviolent struggles in Africa, India, and the Americas; and artworks that speak to violence or issue from an inner space of peace. Experiments with Truth counterpoints poetry and ideas with mid-20th-century abstraction, sacred art from various traditions, and contemporary video and installations.
About the Authors
Josef Helfenstein is the director of the Menil Collection and a scholar who has published extensively on modern and contemporary art. The realization of the Experiments with Truth exhibition and this book about Gandhi and the aesthetics of nonviolence is the result of several decades of his professional life.
Joseph N. Newland is the director of publishing at the Menil Collection, a writer, and a student of the arts of contemplation, both traditional and contemporary.
Additional authors include Vinay Lal, Toby Kamps, Emilee Dawn Whitehurst, Eric M. Wolf, and others; reprinted texts are by Thich Nhat Hanh, Kabir, Jelaluddin Rumi, Philips Talbot, and others
